Well friends, November marks the beginning of the cold and flu season. Here in Toronto, we can look forward to hearing commercial messages from the Buckley family, manufacturers of the best remedy for coughs, colds, sneezes, and sore throats, Buckley’s Mixture. Several times a day Mr. Frank Buckley will come over the airways to tell me about his family’s elixir that “tastes awful … and … works”. Frank’s funny “cut to the chase” message has me laughing while nodding my head in agreement. Let’s face it, many of the things in life that “work” actually “taste awful”. Take for example, tough love or vaccinations or working out at the gym — these are all examples of rather unpleasant things that produce enormous benefits. Funerals fall into this category, too. I think it’s safe to say that nobody enjoys going to a funeral. However, once you finally get there you might be surprised to find that they actually “work”. Work??????? By work, I mean that funerals have a healing effect. They provide us an opportunity to honour the deceased and their family, they remind us how precious life really is, they give us an opportunity to meet up with long-lost friends, and might give us an excuse to bury the hatchet and start over. Poet, author and funeral director Thomas Lynch writes that funerals work because “the dead matter to the living. In accompanying the dead, getting them where they need to go, we get where we need to be …” While most people would agree that funerals, like Buckley’s, taste awful, I would hazard to guess that most come home after a funeral and agree that they “work”.